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It’s good to see the project moving forward. And it is even better to see this done by a new generation of contributors. Last October the Windows build broke: new dependencies introduced with the new fast preview required an updated of the SDK. The SDK is the set of libraries and other third party code on which Hugin depends to build and run. In Linux, package management software takes care of such dependencies. In Windows, good luck!

The purpose of the SDK is to build Hugin. Like Hugin itself, many SDK components are under active development with new features introduced in the bleeding edge and stable releases recommended for daily usage. This yields four different types of build:

Hugin release against SDK releases. This is what most users need. It is the most stable and usable Hugin, and is the current 0.7.0 release.

Hugin trunk against SDK releases. Many users cherish this. It gives them early access to the bleeding edge Hugin features. Harry has been publishing such builds for OS X. Linux users have easy access to them through self-building. For Windows, this build was broken since October 2008.

Hugin trunk agains SDK trunk. This is a developers’ dream, and what I am currently working on in my very little spare time. It is the edgiest of the bleeding edge and its purpose is to help advance both the Hugin project and the upstream projects.

Hugin release against SDK trunk is a special case, useful to identify if regressions have been introduced. I’ve used it to determine that a bug I reported was not a Hugin bug.

I’ve been tinkering with the SDK and modified/updated it to build, but my objective is Hugin trunk against SDK trunk. My building environment is a minefield full of experimental stuff that need not encumber the current Hugin release process. I have no time/resources for the other types of builds at the moment.

Enter Guido Kohlmeyer. Earlier this month he published an updated stable SDK for initial testing. It had a few glitches, but with two simplefixes to the process (which I found while tinkering with bleeding edge SDK) it was made to work.

Other users followed, reporting first building attempts, then successful building attempts, and finally even experimental packages for download. Until one new contributor got the whole release process including my installer right: well done, Allard Katan, and thank you for moving the Windows installer forward! I have updated the downloads section of this blog